A new phenomenon has appeared, quite unexpectedly, on the HR horizon. These are the HR Directors who jumped on the bandwagon of appointing ‘HR business partners’ (BP’s) without ever actually having held down that role themselves.  I know this for a fact because some of them have employed me to teach their HR managers, advisers and analysts to become ‘HR BP’s’, having never been trained themselves and therefore not realising that this should signify a conscious and deliberate break from their own, conventional, HR thinking.  If we are looking for analogous situations to express how serious this is then the equivalent in the medical profession would be someone trying to become a consultant having missed out the step of registrar or, in the army, a general being appointed who had never been into battle (certainly true for many HR Directors who never had industrial relations problems before).

In practice it produces a serious disconnect between bright HR professionals, who can see that the whole rationale behind HR business partnering is to produce business evidence that their people management practices add value, and their bosses, who are perpetuating non-evidence based policies (e.g. diversity).  The BP’s also start to regard traditional HR, quite rightly, as a diluted and much lower form of ‘management’ and suddenly realise why its very existence has always been so precarious (particularly in the present climate).  Worse still, once they have earned their spurs as a true BP they are bound to challenge everything they have been taught before.  They have little time for their previous day job because in their eyes they now have much bigger priorities and opportunities to address than giving, say, legal advice for a situation that should never have arisen in the first place (e.g. bullying or sexual harassment?).

They then inevitably want to question, and eventually dismantle, the crumbling edifice that is the typical HR framework of (see EBM has to be a new paradigm): -

Job evaluation and grading – plenty of evidence to show it is often a rigid and expensive way of managing rewards that does not produce the highest performance levels possible

Engagement surveys – they realise the theory behind the employee-customer profit chain is suspect and the links between engagement and performance are never as simple as it suggests

Competence frameworks – because, apart from the specious theory that produced this industry – in practice, quite frankly, anyone with any common sense always knew they were going to become a bureaucratic nightmare without any evidence of added value

Performance management – until they are confident that the measures being used actually measure value

Leadership development –  however attractive it might sound there is no common definition of what effective leadership means and therefore no evidence can be produced to say that effective ‘leadership’ has ever been achieved

Of course, none of this accords with their non-business-partner, HR Directors’ expectations who, over recent years, blithely followed Ulrich’s lead (correlative, as opposed to evidence-based), which spawned a commonly-held view that there had to be a shift in focus from HR transactions to strategy and that this required steady-state, continuous developments in HR’s role.  What they failed to realise was that properly trained, evidence-based, HR BP’s are taught that this shift actually represents a discontinuous, seismic shift in the paradigm on which strategic HR is predicated.  Consequently such HR Directors, who have recently been experiencing the decidedly uncomfortable feeling of the ground moving under their feet (especially those in the public sector being asked to make 25% cuts), are having to make a conscious decision as to which side of this widening chasm they will jump to for survival?

For personal development linked to this topic visit the Consummate Professional Series